


we are for some reason all the time bleeding

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: Leverage
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Multi, OT3, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-26
Updated: 2012-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-17 01:37:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which things are what they are, and become what they can be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we are for some reason all the time bleeding

And later, when they try to pinpoint it, they end up agreeing: right after the thing with the flu. The plane ride home. That’s where it starts: her between them, asleep, them not talking. Alec on a laptop, Eliot flirting with the flight attendant. Nothing unusual. Nothing special, even, because they’ve done this a dozen times.

But, and this is important, there is one tiny, small, little, really negligible difference: this time, the teasing (always affectionate now, it’s been a year since there was any real anger behind it) has some heat there. Not anger, heat. They’re different things. Alec’s better at explaining it, later, than Eliot is, and Parker was asleep, so she doesn’t remember. That’s when it started, or anyway when they realized what was going on, what had been going on.

They land in Portland, exhausted, and it’s only through sheer force of will that Eliot drives them to Alec’s apartment without getting them all killed. He carries Parker up the stairs (pointedly not pointing out that he’s got two bullet wounds and she slept the whole flight home), Alec barely lifting his feet high enough to clear each step. When he lays her on the bed, turns to go, he runs right into the smartest guy he’s ever known. “Don’t even think about it,” Alec slurs, eyes barely open. “You die on the road, she’ll kill me.”

Every nerve in Eliot’s body is screaming at him to get out. Everything he’s ever lived has told him that these kinds of things, these arrangements, never work. Of course, Alec didn’t mean romantic things, not right then. Not until they were healed and healthy. But Eliot wasn’t an idiot, and Alec wasn’t ever anything anywhere close to subtle, and Parker talked in her sleep. 

The middle of the bed was too soft, Parker’s snores cranked in his ears, Alec’s big stupid feet were frigid. He slept better there than he ever had.

—-

The smell of the kitchen wakes him up, which is his own fault. He is well aware, logically, that Eliot didn’t (doesn’t) sleep, not for long, and so he should have been prepared for waking up to food smells every morning. But he isn’t, it’s still new. 

He’d always, the times he let himself daydream about it, pictured a fully dressed and freshly bloodied (it was the way he’d always seen him, can you blame his imagination?) Eliot dropping a plate in front of him with a scowl, not talking until he’d had his coffee, that sort of thing. But that was when he didn’t know Eliot well, before he’d seen him hold back tears and have the jitters and hold Alec’s neck and promise to stop the bad guy with his bare hands if Alec could just get him there. 

Eliot wears workout pants and a faded T-shirt with a school’s name on it, so worn out Alec can’t quite make the name of the school resolve into letters. It’s not his, and he knows it’s not Parker’s, so Eliot must have had it in his backpack. Maybe it’s even his high school, who knows. Alec wants, sharp and sudden and sweet, to trace the letters with long fingers, to ask what they say, to see Eliot’s yearbook picture where, he imagines, the hitter is grinning widely and without shadows in his eyes. Today, here and now, though, the sun through the kitchen window catches on bare feet on the wooden floor and loose hair still rumpled from sleep, and Eliot isn’t grinning but he does look a little lighter, a tiny bit less eaten up inside, than he has in a long time. Alec slides into a chair, rests his elbows on the bar, tries to figure out what expression is on his face so he can make it something adequate.

Alec can just barely hear music if he tries, something with lots of strings and a rough woman’s voice — Eliot will tell him, later, that he likes to listen to this particular mix CD that his nephews made him, full of bluegrass and old country and a tiny bit of Red Dirt new stuff, whenever he makes breakfast. He’ll tell him in the way that is a question without questioning, like he wants Alec to assure him it’s okay or not weird but cannot fathom actually asking for or receiving that. But that happens later, not now.

Now, Eliot sets the heaping plate down carefully.

Now, Eliot gives what could be a grin over the rim of his mug (which, Alec will come to find out later, is full of blazing hot green tea, because coffee isn’t a morning drink, apparently).

Now, Eliot sits across from him at the round table, working out the menu for next month at the pub, ”What do you think, yerba mate pound cake? Or is it too—”

“Hipster, yeah,” Alec says through a mouthful of something delicious involving eggs and potatoes. “Maybe that chai ice cream you made last week?”

“Eh,” Eliot waves a hand in dismissal. “Needs work, the balance is off. I’ll ask Monique when we get there.” 

“How are my boys?” Parker drops down from a beam in the ceiling. Today she’s dressed for work, black jumpsuit and heavy boots. “Hash?”

“In the pan, want an egg on it?” Eliot peers carefully at her as she kisses Alec and then crosses to kiss him — and that’s interesting, isn’t it, that this happens right now? Just a soft press of lips, nothing more, nothing like anything at all, just what people do to say good morning, and yet here it is, already, like it has always been this way and Eliot and Alec just haven’t noticed until now. Which, given the sureness of Parker always being in charge, is certainly possible.

“Nope. Syrup?”

Her back is to them, so she doesn’t see the changing expressions flittering at the edges of Eliot’s face. “We’re all out,” he says at last, catching Alec’s eyes. “Blame the geek.”

—-

The secret is that Parker’s the one who runs the show. Kissing’s great, she loves kissing. Making out, even, top notch, two thumbs up from her. Sex? Well. There’s nothing wrong with it, she doesn’t hate it. It’s just…She always stops there, presses her lips together, tries to steal the words. It’s just that once she sees the boys together, she understands why sex has always been her third (fourth, really) choice on the list of activities that involve two bodies (wait, tandem skydiving counts as a thing on that list of activities, right? Two bodies, after all. Then yes, fourth on the list is sex). 

There are things Alec loves about her that are his alone: the space between her breasts that is shiny, not from sweat but just shiny, like her skin is secretly some kind of polymer that reflects light like a disco ball. The angle her back makes when she uses him as a fulcrum in her laser work. The scent of her hair when she wears it in what they call “the waitress,” which is really just a bun but it’s more fun to give it a cool code name.

And there are things that Spencer loves about her that are his alone: the glint in her eye when they spar, her elbows sharp and dangerous. The taste of her neck. The sounds she makes when she eats something he made her, something that makes her think of stealing and jumping and tumblers dropping into place. 

As for what she loves about the boys, well, that’s for her to know. And that’s the end of the sentence.

—-

Moving in isn’t on anyone’s agenda, but when they look up and realize they haven’t slept anywhere but at Alec’s place in a month and a half, well. Agendas can be altered. 

Neither is coming out, or going places together. Not out of shame or anything like that, just out of a sense of decorum and an understanding that in their line of work, open connections were sources of danger for everyone involved. It was bad enough that the bad-bad guys might know Hardison and Parker were an item — might take one to get at the other — but add a third and everything got more complicated and worse and more dangerous. 

But Eliot got a letter, straightforward and blunt, and his face turned first ashen, then red. And he stared into the middle distance for a while, his face carefully blank. And then he said, “Y’all want to go to a party with me?” 

It wasn’t a party, actually, it was a wake, but he didn’t tell them that until they’d already said yes — Parker with a wide grin and Alec with a guarded nod — and bought plane tickets. A guy Eliot knew from the service, a good man, he said, a guy they’d called Cougar and hadn’t ever known his real name. And Eliot walked in with them, not holding hands but clearly as a group, and introduced them as “Parker” and “Alec” with no honorifics or context clues, and scrounged up a hat for Parker, and sat between them in the Catholic service, and when Alec heard him take a deep and shaky breath, accepted the hand on his back and Parker’s on his knee, and stared straight ahead.

When they got home from that, Eliot disappeared for an hour or so. Came back with two duffel bags and a pot of basil. Never looked back.

**Author's Note:**

> [title from "Weekend in Western Illinois" by the Mountain Goats]

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] we are for some reason all the time bleeding](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858166) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




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